Ron Paul Graphs

Focus group's satisfaction grows for GOP field during debate

Rochester, New Hampshire (CNN) -- They squinted and stared, laughed and frowned and furiously twisted little gray knobs, giving political analysts a critical early look into the minds of Republican voters.

And what did researchers see there? An energized party fairly champing at the bit for the coming presidential election.

That was the scene inside the beautiful, century-old Rochester Opera House as 21 likely Republican voters watched the debate and took part in a dial test set up by Southern Methodist University.

Using handheld "perception analyzers" calibrated to register immediate reactions, members of the randomly selected group reacted to the debate as it happened. Second by second, they moved their dials to the right or to the left, indicating a positive or negative response to what they were hearing and seeing.

Southern Methodist University professors Dan Schill and Rita Kirk tracked the average response of the group to each moment of the two-hour debate, and said for starters, each candidate produced strong moments.

For instance, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's highest rating of the night came when he pressed for energy independence.

"It's time for us to have a president who really cares about finally getting America on track for energy security," the former Massachusetts governor said, and the tracking lines rose right along with his voice.

Former Godfather's Pizza mogul Herman Cain made the dials spin in his favor when he was asked about Muslim influence in the government.

"I do not believe in sharia law in American courts. I believe in American laws in American courts, period." The crowd in the debate hall roared and the lines in Rochester rose.

Rep. Ron Paul of Texas pushed the lines up by lighting into imminent domain laws.

"Property and free society should be owned by the people, and it shouldn't be regulated to death by the governments, whether it's Washington, D.C., or local governments."

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich drew the focus group's favor by criticizing the United States' involvement in Libya.

At no point did the response graph dip into negative territory; perhaps not surprising in a group of 13 Republicans and 8 Republican-leaning independents. Still, it is notable that every statement received a favorable response, especially when President Obama's policies were in the crosshairs.

How to Retrieve Data from Facebook Using PHP: Tutorial | PyThoughts

It has been a while since I’ve done a very technical tutorial on PyThoughts, so I thought I’d write one today. It’s about getting data from Facebook, and the best ways to do that.

This is by far the easiest way to get data from Facebook, although it might not be a complete solution for you. The method is simple, and I do it like this:

This should result with the output: “Ron Paul has 296188 fans on Facebook!”

This would be an easy way, let’s say, to create an application that compares the popularity of politicians on the Facebook social network. All you would need is the page id or page name of all of the major politicians, and output them into a nice format.

This is also a simple method of getting details about an entity on Facebook, comparable to the Graph API. You can use Facebook’s special query language, FQL (similar to all SQL languages), to request this data. This is how I use it:

Sometimes requests like this just won’t do, and you need to hack the damn page. For this, you need to load the page up in PHP, and use its source code to retrieve the information that you want.

For instance, say you want to find out the Facebook Page ID using the page URL . There might be a way to do this using the fql, but I couldn’t think of a way in the time that I was planning this tutorial. I decided just to make a dirty hack and have fun with it.

Here I am loading the page:

What this is doing, is it’s getting the contents of the Facebook page (hopefully), and putting them into this variable called “response”. Then, we’re splitting that content up into matches of “pid=” (Facebook’s way of saying Page ID). We’re then taking the first occurrence of pid (which is hopefully the id of the page that we’re on), and splitting that from the rest of the page, by splitting it at the “&” sign, which Facebook uses to end off the id sequence.

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Graph theory and combinatorics, 1988, proceedings of the Cambridge Combinatorial Conference in honour of Paul Erdős